Copy That Quizmas #2: Seb

This Christmas, I am asking Santa for...

Walerian Borowczyk Short Films and Animation, Arrow's recently released Blu-ray of shorts by the Polish master animator and art/erotic filmmaker. The only Borowczyk short film I've seen, Dom (not included in this collection), I watched at an animation festival in Norwich many years ago, and like most of Borowczyk's full-length films, it's a trip that's hard to forget. I'm told several of the other shorts are equally good; I'm looking forward to seeing Angel Games (below) in particular.

My favourite new word this year was...

Susurration (noun), meaning "whispering, murmuring or rustling"

(With thanks to Will Self, who wrote the foreword to a book I worked on earlier in the year, Subterranean London, compiled by Bradley L. Garrett.)

My top three books of the year were...

I'm very much enjoying William Rothman's Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, possibly one of the great Hitchcock studies (I'll have to finish to know for sure), I got a lot from T. J. Clark's elegantly written and insightful Picasso and Truth, and I loved David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire by Martha P. Nochimson. As always, Nochimson's writing opens up so many new ways to think about and experience Lynch that it's hard to take everything in at once. I can't wait to read the book again.

My tip for surviving Christmas is...

Lean into it.

If I were a Christmas animal, I would be...

I might be a donkey. I don't know if donkeys ever get jealous of reindeer, the flashier Christmas herd animal, but I wouldn't, because donkeys are cool.

I would like Krampus to carry off in his sack...

Krampus is a figure of pure terror whose presence in this realm I don't much like to contemplate. But those auto-play promotion videos, maybe.

My proudest achievement this year was...

I'm proud of making this six-second conceptual remake of The Shining with Rebecca Wigmore, for a Vine competition. It was hard work, and we ran up against more fake-blood-related logistical problems than probably either of us was prepared for, but I think it came out pretty well.

Other highlights included:

• Starting to plan and write a new film-studies-type book
• Hearing the news about Twin Peaks, series 3 
• Watching Transparent

Next year, I am looking forward to stretching my vocabulary with...

Sundry editors, artists, translators, academics, writers, artists, poets and general good types that I'm lucky to know and to work with.